Tony Blair Quotes

What we want to see is the development of human rights and greater democracy, not just because it is our system but because we think that's the best way that economic and political development go hand in hand. ~ Tony Blair

We are asked now seriously to accept that in the last few years-contrary to all history, contrary to all intelligence-Saddam decided unilaterally to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd. ~ Tony Blair

It [the intelligence service] concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes, including against his own Shia population; and that he is actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability ... ~ Tony Blair

I'm not so comfortable with politicians. Meeting them always just feels weird and a bit creepy, no matter who it is. For example, I met Tony Blair during The Osbournes period at this thing called the Pride of Britain Awards. He was all right, I suppose; very charming. But I couldn't get over the fact that our young soldiers were dying out in the Middle East and he could still find the time to hang around with pop stars.
Then he came over to me and said, 'I was in a rock'n'roll band once, y'know?'
I said, 'So I believe, Prime Minister.'
'But I could never work out the chords to "Iron Man".'
I wanted to say, 'F**k me, Tony, that's a staggering piece of information, that is. I mean, you're at war with Afghanistan, people are getting blown up all over the place, so who honestly gives a f**k that you could never work out the chords to "Iron Man"?'
But they're all the same, so there's no point getting wound up about it. ~ Ozzy Osbourne

You know, one of the things I've learnt since coming out of office is how much easier it is to give the advice than take the decision. I mean, you know, it's tough. ~ Tony Blair

I'm a big fan of Tony Blair. I'm not saying that I think his judgment has always been right, but I look at him as a person. ~ Louise Nurding

Whatever the dangers of the action we take, the dangers of inaction are far, far greater. ~ Tony Blair

I have absolutely no doubt at all that we will find evidence of weapons of mass destruction programmes. ~ Tony Blair

My journalistic mission was straightforward: to await the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Nobody knew quite when this would be. But the diplomacy - the meetings in the U.N. security council, the allegations about weapons of mass destruction, the martial language of Tony Blair and George W. Bush - all suggested a war was brewing. ~ Luke Harding

I do think it's strange that I get associated with Iraq more than the people who were Foreign Secretary or Defence Secretary. It's because of my closeness to Tony [Blair], which I don't regret at all. I think that was a privilege. ~ Alastair Campbell

Before people crow about the absence of weapons of mass destruction, I suggest they wait a bit. ~ Tony Blair

I do not seek unpopularity as a badge of honour, but sometimes it is the price of leadership and the cost of conviction. ~ Tony Blair

And the problem is, I can apologise for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I can't, sincerely at least, apologise for removing Saddam. ~ Tony Blair

The 21st century will not be about the battle between capitalism and socialism but between the forces of progress and the forces of conservatism. ~ Tony Blair

How do we deal with not just the acts of violence, but the extremist ideology that lies behind them? Because though the numbers of fanatics that go and join and kill for a group like ISIS are measured in tens of thousands, those that support the wider ideology, I'm afraid, you measure in tens of millions or more. ~ Tony Blair

Every so often, I feel I should graduate to classical music, properly. But the truth is, I'm more likely to listen to rock music. ~ Tony Blair

The only option to avoid war is the departure of the number one warmonger in the world US President George W Bush. His policy has brought disaster to the United States. This crazy man should go and also his subject, disciple and follower UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. ~ Naji Sabri

The British are special. The world knows it. In our innermost thoughts we know it. This is the greatest nation on earth. ~ Tony Blair

I shall not rest until, once again, the destinies of our people and our party are joined together again in victory at the next general election Labour in its rightful place in government again. ~ Tony Blair

I may find Saddam Hussein's regime abhorrent - any normal person would - but the survival of it is in his hands. ~ Tony Blair

Human progress has never been shaped by commentators, complainers or cynics. ~ Tony Blair

The first big choice: a government with the strength to deliver stability, or a government that takes the country back to boom and bust. ~ Tony Blair

The intelligence is clear: (Saddam) continues to believe his WMD programme is essential both for internal repression and for external aggression. ~ Tony Blair

The Iraqi elections struck a blow to the heart of global terrorism. ~ Tony Blair

Bill Clinton has been a true leader of the western world. He has been a friend and a counsel to me and other leaders right around the world. ~ Tony Blair

For the first time perhaps since Margaret Thatcher, we will have at the head of the Conservative Party someone who is genuinely an equal match for Tony Blair. ~ Tim Yeo

The public think the politicians don't know or care about their lives; and the politicians feel misunderstood. ~ Tony Blair

For all that the papers would say I was a liar, I took the words I was saying at briefings as seriously as Tony Blair took what he would say at the Despatch Box. I find it very difficult not to tell the truth. I felt I was accountable for what I said. ~ Alastair Campbell

Terrorist threats are not happening just in this country, but in every European country and every country across the globe. As a result of that, we do sometimes have to take measures we would rather not take in order to give us the security we need. ~ Tony Blair

The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes. ~ Tony Blair

I can stand here today, leader of the Labour Party, Prime Minister, and say to the British people: you have never had it so ... prudent. ~ Tony Blair

She was the people's princess and that is how she will stay, how she will remain in our hearts and our memories for ever. ~ Tony Blair

Once his wife goes to sleep it takes a minor nuclear explosion to wake her. ~ Tony Blair

It's not a burning ambition for me to make sure that David Beckham earns less money. ~ Tony Blair

There are unquestionably links between al Qaida and Iraq. ~ Tony Blair

Sovereignty rests with me as an English MP and that's the way it will stay. ~ Tony Blair

Enough of talking. It is time now to do. ~ Tony Blair

Deportation is a decision taken by the home secretary under statute, The new grounds will include fostering hatred, advocating violence to further a person's beliefs, or justifying or validating such violence. ~ Tony Blair

The threat from Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction - chemical, biological, potentially nuclear weapons capability - that threat is real. ~ Tony Blair

However much I dislike the idea of abortion, you should not criminalize a woman who, in very difficult circumstances, makes that choice. ~ Tony Blair

I believe the bicentenary offers us a chance not just to say how profoundly shameful the slave trade was - how we condemn its existence utterly and praise those who fought for its abolition - but also to express our deep sorrow that it could ever have happened and rejoice at the better times we live in today ~ Tony Blair

We can only protect liberty by making it relevant to the modern world. ~ Tony Blair

You get these insurgent movements of populism, left and right. An insurgent movement of populism took my political party over in the UK for example. ~ Tony Blair

Of particular importance to us is the recognition ... that what we want is a Europe of nations, not a federal super-state. ~ Tony Blair

If what the science tells us about climate change is correct, then unabated it will result in catastrophic consequences for our world ~ Tony Blair

There have been the most terrible, shocking events taking place in the United States of America within the last couple of hours ... We can only imagine the terror and carnage there and the many, many innocent people who have lost their lives ... perpetrated by fanatics who are utterly indifferent to the sanctity of human life, and we, the democracies of this world, are going to have to come together to fight it and eradicate this evil completely from our world. ~ Tony Blair

I remember talking to Alex Ferguson about Tony [Blair] and Gordon [Brown], and he said: "Why doesn't Tony just get rid of him?" But if you sack someone in football, they can't turn up to training the next day. In politics they're still on the pitch. Gordon would still have been a big player. ~ Alastair Campbell

The socialism of centralised state control of industry and production, is dead. It misunderstood the nature and development of a modern market economy. It failed to recognise that the state and public sector can become a vested interest capable of oppression as much as the vested interests of wealth and capital. it was based on a false view of class that became too rigid to explain or illuminate the nature of class division today. ~ Tony Blair

Our new world rests on order. The danger is disorder. And in today's world, it can now spread like contagion. ~ Tony Blair

Sometimes it is better to lose and do the right thing than to win and do the wrong thing. ~ Tony Blair

Grown-up politicians talk to each other across party lines. Over the last few weeks I have had lengthy conversations with Ed Miliband, David Miliband, with Tony Blair, with Peter Mandelson ... talking about Europe, talking about political reform. ~ Nick Clegg

Sometimes, and in particular dealing with a dictator, the only chance of peace is a readiness for war. ~ Tony Blair

I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning. ~ Doris Lessing

I didn't come into politics to change the Labour Party. I came into politics to change the country. ~ Tony Blair

If we are going to carry on growing, and we will, because no country is going to forfeit its right to economic growth, we have to find a way of doing it sustainably. ~ Tony Blair

I think the people like myself who are in the center ground of politics and who think that center left and center right can cooperate and work together. Who don't like this sort of insurgent populism because we think it's not really going to deliver for the people, I think there's a big responsibility on us in the center to get our act together. And to work out radical but serious solutions to the problems people face. ~ Tony Blair

But let's be clear. We're talking about a country where there's no opposition. As leader he can ignore Parliament and - sorry that's Tony Blair isn't it? Um, so he doesn't even have to ask the country before he goes to war - sorry that's still Tony Blair. ~ Rory Bremner

My view is that you still, in order to win from the Labour perspective, have to have a strong alliance with business as well as the unions. You have got to be very much in the centre ground on things like public sector reform. ~ Tony Blair

There is good evidence that last year's European heat wave was influenced by global warming. It resulted in 26,000 premature deaths and cost $13.5 billion. ~ Tony Blair

The view we took at the time and we take it now is that the war was justified legally because he [Saddam Hussein] remained in breach of UN resolutions. ~ Tony Blair

There is no meeting of minds, no point of understanding with such terror. Just a choice: Defeat it or be defeated by it. And defeat it we must. ~ Tony Blair

September 11 was, and remains, above all an immense human tragedy. But September 11 also posed a momentous and deliberate challenge not just to America but to the world at large. The target of the terrorists was not only New York and Washington but the very values of freedom, tolerance and decency which underpin our way of life. ~ Tony Blair

The appalling details of the campaign of intimidation - which include grave-robbing - show the depths to which the animal extremists are prepared to stoop. ~ Tony Blair

Ah yes, liberal democrats unified as ever in opportunism and in error. ~ Tony Blair

What we want to do is reform the welfare system in the way that Tony Blair talked about 13 years ago but never achieved - a system that was created for the days after the Second World War. That prize is now I think achievable. ~ Iain Duncan Smith

Make the wrong choices now and future generations will live with a changed climate, depleted resources and without the green space and biodiversity that contribute both to our standard of living and our quality of life ~ Tony Blair

I think Tony Blair has to come down on one side or the other. You can't be a half-hearted supporter of the possible attack on Iraq. You're either with George Bush or you're against him. ~ Simon Hoggart

Society works by putting opportunity and responsibility together. ~ Tony Blair

Do I know I'm right? Judgments aren't the same as facts. Instinct is not science. I'm like any other human being, as fallible and as capable of being wrong. I only know what I believe. ~ Tony Blair

I am not sure that we would always want 16-year-olds to do all the things they can do. I am afraid that I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman on the voting age. I think that it should remain as it is. ~ Tony Blair

I think all of our experience with (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein teaches us that diplomacy has very little chance of working unless it is clear to him that if diplomacy does not work, that the threatened reality of force is there,. ~ Tony Blair

Both Bush as well as Tony Blair are undermining an idea [the United Nations]. Is this because the secretary general of the United Nations [Ghanaian Kofi Annan] is now a black man? They never did that when secretary generals were white. ~ Nelson Mandela

When you consider what Tony Blair was saying about liberty, human rights and that sort of thing, it would be terribly revolutionary to sell the speeches he and Jack Straw made in 1994. ~ Rory Bremner

As Tony Blair has made clear, our fundamental challenge is how to make Europe work better. ~ John Hutton

A poll when Blair left said that 69 per cent of people reckoned Blair's legacy would be the Iraq War. I think that ignores his real record of achievement in dismantling the Labour movement. It's amazing to think that the huge effort he went to creating a massive cash-for-honours scandal will be overshadowed. Blair was said to be saddened that he hasn't managed to serve for as many years as Thatcher. Instead he will have to content himself with having killed more women and children than Genghis Khan. Ironically, for a man who is so obsessed with legacy, his memory will live on longer than most politicians - as a ghost story that Iraqi mothers use to frighten their children. That said, I do think that Blair stands a good chance of success in his new role of Peace Envoy. There's a real chance that all those different groups in the Middle East will join together to try and kill him. In six months time he could be putting an end to years of suffering as he is sacrificed on an altar in the centre of Baghdad while everyone celebrates like it's the end of a Star Wars movie. ~ Frankie Boyle

George W. Bush and Tony Blair had to convince the world that Saddam Hussein represented an imminent threat. Tony Blair lied when he claimed that Iraq could launch a chemical or biological attack within 45 minutes. ~ Bianca Jagger

Tony Blair will be remembered for nothing other than that he followed George W. Bush over a cliff; took the rest of us with them, and we haven't yet reached the bottom, I'm afraid. ~ George Galloway

Well, we definitely need a strong and clear and assertive America. That's for sure. But you've always got to build alliances. And so it's very important that we are able to build those alliances. And where we don't do what in a way to extremists want us to do, which is to make this into a battle between the West and Islam - it's not. This isn't a clash between civilizations. It's about whether the values of tolerance and respect for difference prevail. ~ Tony Blair

I do not believe Tony Blair was a fundamentally good man who went bad. I believe he was evil in the first place. ~ Steve Earle

Just as the England football manager starts with bells and flags and balloons and ends up reviled, so do prime ministers. Tony Blair - is there anyone more despised now? Gordon Brown - all right, nobody voted for him but, you know ... just think of any of them. Margaret Thatcher. John Major. Steve McLaren. Fabio Capello. ~ Terry Wogan

As a student, I had stayed with Winston Churchill; later, I had lunched with Harold Macmillan - in fact, had met most of the post-war prime ministers of Great Britain from Douglas-Home to Tony Blair. ~ Nigel Hamilton

The British press ... [claimed that Tony] Blair was simply Bush's poodle - a favorite phrase, bewilderingly popular, although it made no sense - and that he was ignoring the will of the British people. Considering the hacks had spent Blair's first six years in office condemning him for relying on focus groups and opinion polls for his policies - in other words, paying attention to nothing but the will of the people, or at least their whims - that seemed a little rich to me, but as I said, logical consistency has never figured highly in the British media's scale of values. ~ Larry King

The class war is over. ~ Tony Blair

There can be no freedom for Africa without justice; and no justice without declaring war on Africa's poverty, disease and famine with as much vehemence as we remove the tyrant and the terrorist. ~ Tony Blair

And just as the terrorist seeks to divide humanity in hate, so we have to unify it around an idea. And that idea is liberty. ~ Tony Blair

I was in New York when Clinton was elected the first time, and everyone I knew was in a state of mad euphoria. I wondered what had happened to my hard-headed friends? Almost everyone I knew was drunk on this great white hope. The next time I was in New York, no one had a good word to say about Clinton, but everyone was in love with Hillary. She was the last word. It's all so unreal. Of course, it's no different in England. Here everyone was besotted with Tony Blair. He was a new face. Do people never learn? ~ Doris Lessing

In Downing Street they called me 'Boss'. Civil servants would always call me 'Prime Minister'. ~ Tony Blair

Gordon Brown now bestrides politics and the media like the Colossus of Dunfermline. Whatever happened to Tony Blair? ~ Austin Mitchell

The understanding which has driven New Labour's reform is to put the individual citizen - the patient, the parent, the pupil, the law abiding citizen - at the centre of each public service, with the service reformed to meet their individual requirements ~ Tony Blair

A simple way to take measure of a country is to look at how many want in.. And how many want out. ~ Tony Blair

I think the journey for a politician goes from wanting to please all the people all the time, to a political leader that realises in the end his responsibility is to decide. And when he decides, he divides. ~ Tony Blair

What matters is what works. ~ Tony Blair

Yes, I did have to struggle very hard to get this [the vote on the Iraq war] through, but the reason I did it was because I thought it was the right thing to do. I didn't take this on myself ... just because I thought, 'Let's give myself a really hard time for a couple of years! ~ Tony Blair

There is nothing like waking up at six in the morning and changing a baby's nappy to bring you face to face with life's reality. ~ Tony Blair

This was absolutely an attack on [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair, principally, and the perspective which is really predominant in Europe right now that he's not questioning enough of Mr. Bush's policies. (about his latest song Shoot the Dog) ~ George Michael

I will do what it takes to help Ed Miliband win general election ~ Tony Blair

My guess is that good and bad parenting is spread fairly evenly across different social groups. But can you imagine Tony Blair lecturing the middle class on how to bring up their children? He is far more comfortable as a latter-day exponent of the Poor Law mentality. ~ Martin Jacques

I feel like everyone else in this country today. I am utterly devastated. ~ Tony Blair

I see the Koran very much as an outsider. It stands in the great prophetic tradition of trying to return people to the basic principles of spirituality. Taken for its time, it was an extraordinarily progressive declaration of principle. It is also extraordinary for a Christian to read: for example, there are more references to Mary than in the Gospels. The tragedy is that it has been so warped and misapplied. ~ Tony Blair

Real progress cannot be measured by money alone. We must ensure that economic growth contributes to our quality of life, rather than degrading it ~ Tony Blair